If you are new to cryptocurrency, it can be hard to know where to start. Whom can you trust, and what websites can you turn to for trusted and valuable information? CoinGecko is a cryptocurrency website that offers many resources that can help whether you are a crypto newbie or a veteran crypto investor.
Coin Overviews
The best know-feature of CoinGecko has to be its price tracker, but the site has so many more features to help newbies and veterans alike. To start with, I like how CoinGecko not only lists the price of a coin and its history but gives a quick description of the coin and its intended use case. Suppose that you are a newbie and your friend tells you to consider investing in something called "Polkadot". You might not know what the coin is, and you might not feel like reading a whitepaper, but with CoinGecko, you can easily see a succinct summary of the coin's value proposition right on the price quote page.
Obviously, you should do more of your research before deciding to invest, but seeing a short synopsis of the coin can give you a great initial understanding of the coin's value proposition to determine if it is something that warrants more time investing in and learning about or whether its something you can pass on without wasting time. And if you want to do more research to decide what to invest in, CoinGecko can help with that.
One thing that can be frustrating about finding a new coin is trying to spend time tracking down an exchange that supports that coin. CoinGecko simplifies this process by listing several exchange options right there on the main page for the coin so that you have a shortlist of where to start looking.
Comparing Coins
CoinGecko's "Compare" tool allows you to compare cryptos side by side to understand how they are similar, how they are different, and then decide which you prefer. Let's suppose that I am a newbie and I hear some people saying to invest in Ethereum and some people saying to invest in Bitcoin. With the "Compare" tool, I can see the important differences between the two coins including current supply, total supply, hashing algorithm, date of launch, and trading volume.
If you are comparing two coins and see a term that you don't understand, you can easily hop right on over to CoinGecko's Glossary section where you can find simple, two or three sentence explanations for just about any crypto-related term you might be struggling to understand.
Comparing Lending Rates
Once you've gone through the process of learning about a coin, comparing it to others, and purchasing it, you might consider lending out your crypto to increase your returns and earn interest....and CoinGecko can help with that as well. CoinGecko's "Earn" tool is a quick reference that shows what interest rates you can get for lending your crypto on various platforms. There are two things that I like about this. First, it compares BOTH DeFi and Centralized platforms so that you can easily see potential interest rates without having to visit several different websites. Second, it gives "Security Ratings" that can help compare risk between lending on platforms.
Research Tools and Resources
Someone who writes and researches about crypto can also find several useful features on CoinGecko's website. For example, the "Categories" tab displays the leading cryptos by category. If I write about DeFi, I can look and see the most popular DeFi tokens that I might want to write about. If I want to write about the Polkadot ecosystem, I can see the top coins within that ecosystem.
Likewise, the "Recently Added", "Large Movers", and "High Volume" tabs can show coins that are potentially hot topics for an article or crypto blog. If a coin goes up, people will search for it hoping to jump in on the profits. If a coin goes down, people will search for explanations and reassurance. Recently added coins can make good topics for research as people will want to learn more about them, and if you're one of the first to create an article on a new project, you've got less keyword competition.
Adding graphics to any presentation can always be helpful, and CoinGeko has you covered with its "Widgets" and "Stacking Sats" tabs. The "Widgets" tab allows you to choose from a variety of useful images including a crypto heatmap that can graphically depict the top 100 cryptos by market cap as well as color-coding the coins that have gone up or down for the day.
The "Stacking Sats" tab is an interesting alternative to boring text-based ROI calculators and is a fun way of visualizing how much crypto savings can add up over time.
I know that I've covered it in a previous article, but it's also worth noting that CoinGecko has the amazing Candies program in which you can earn candies simply for logging into the site each day. Those candies can then be traded for discounted crypto-related merchandise or sometimes an official CoinGeko T-shirt!
Summary
Although CoinGecko does allow you to check the prices of cryptos, it also has a whole host of additional features that can help crypto newbies and advanced users alike. It is a site that I use quite frequently and I think that it has a lot of useful info that can help you on your crypto journey.
As always, thanks for reading! Not Financial Advice
